Alumni Spotlight John Sheppard, MD Resident 1983-1986 City: Norfolk, VA
Family: I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. Mom & Dad were also natives and married in Mt. Lebanon. I spent two college summers working at Eye & Ear Hospital, one with Ophthalmology Chair Ken Richardson as a graphic artist (no Power Point in the 70’s) and one for ENT Chair Eugene Myers as a writer. My wife of 42 amazing years, Clelia, is Italian. When we moved to Pittsburgh, she had never been to the States before. We discovered immediately that Pittsburgh boasts a higher percentage of Italian heritage individuals than any city in the country so she adapted immediately. We enjoyed three great years in Pittsburgh living a block from my old high school and a mile from my parents. Clelia now runs a theater and a gallery in Cape Charles and is very active in the arts. We have four children, and they’re living all over the states.
Hobbies: I love music. I play keyboards and rock and roll in 3 different bands. One of the bands we named iDox. We do fundraisers for corneal and organ donation awareness, food charities, vision foundations and eye banks. We don’t get paid very well, and we still have to move our own equipment most of the time, just like in college.
Career: My career was circuitous due to a Navy scholarship. I did a pediatric internship because medical school convinced me to embrace primary care. That was by far the most interesting medical rotation at Brown. The Navy allowed me to deliver primary care for four years in Italy with the 6th Fleet, where I realized I was not a pediatrician, I was an ophthalmologist. We flew from Italy back to the States for a blitzkrieg interview tour with many prestigious programs at the time. I chose Pittsburgh because of the well-rounded approach to all forms of ophthalmologic disease, the all star faculty, and the community outreach. I was very much attracted to the Campbell Lab too: as a Navy physician, I developed a strong interest in infectious diseases. After residency, I enjoyed a 30 month fellowship in Cornea, Uveitis, and Third World Disease at San Francisco’s Proctor
Foundation. I truly enjoyed that. Thereafter we chose Virginia because it was the closest warm beach town to Pittsburgh with an ophthalmology residency program: Pittsburgh was just too cold and there was no ocean. Mom & dad were temporarily crushed, but visited us frequently, then eventually moved in with us. When I started in Norfolk, Virginia, we were socially totally alone. We both worked very hard. I built our group from two doctors to 40 doctors, 400 employees, 10 locations, and a six room OR. I’m very excited about our Virginia practice. We built a world-class facility and team. We have dozens of clinical trials going now. with a full-time research staff. Our new ASC is second to none. We’ve had a series of mergers with private equity, the first of which was with Cincinnati Eye Institute to form CVP. We became the biggest ophthalmology practice in the country. Two and a half years later, we were blessed by another private equity transaction with Eye Care Partners: the biggest optometric group in the country. So now we’re the biggest in both worlds, the John Sheppard, MD largest integrated eye care delivery network. We truly make an effort to grow vertically at ECP. Ironically only about 500 ophthalmologists graduate every year in the United States, yet the Medicare population has doubled twice since I graduated from residency training. We can bring quality care to everyone in the country, including rural and disadvantaged areas, with a genuine spirit of collaboration between our professions. With this efficient clinical and management model, I’m still able to concentrate on corneal disease and uveitis.I still see a lot of kids with those problems, a continuation of my interest in pediatrics. It’s truly been very rewarding. We have a translational research laboratory at Eastern Virginia Medical School here in Norfolk. It’s called the Thomas Lee Center for Ocular Pharmacology. I was also the Continued on next page.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS 9
